Let-pae Dorrit Cohn Transparent —= Minds Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in FictionCopyright © 1978 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press Princecon, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ‘This book has been composed in VIP Bernbo Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and bi chosen for strength and durability ng materials are Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey rijksuniversiteit a Dibliotheek letteren (AAV ERSTD we ( \ Gtonmicanaz > 2BLIOTHECK, Preface ‘The questions that gave rise to this book arose empiri- cally, at the point where my interest in narrative form, came to meet my predilection for novels with choughefal characters and scenes of selfcommunion. The need to ac~ Count for analogies and variations sent me to narrative theory {just long enough to contemplate what Todorov calls “the vir- tualities of literary discourse.” Equipped with these basic abstractions I could then travel around in narrative literature, selecting works and passages in works chat would best display the entire spectrum of possibilities, while in tum allowing these works themselves to reveal unforeseen hues. The resule js a exitical text woven of a multitude of paradigmatic quota~ tions and close analyses, all held within a firm typological frame ‘My eextual repertoire rarely departs from the corpus of nar- rative literature most familiar to students of fictional form. A century of psychological realism—roughly 1850 to 1950— provides the majority of illustrations, with some additions from as far back as Sterne and as far forward as Sarraute. ‘When I move sideways to less familiar ground—usually to the German domain, which I know best—it is always to point up anomalies that illuminate the norm. ‘Even though my approach follows typological rather than chronological lines, [have not altogether disregarded the his~ torical dimension. The direction in which I sweep across the principal techniques generally corresponds to evolutionary Changes of fictional form: from vocal to hushed authorial voices, fom dissonant to consonant relations between nar- ators and protagonists, from maximal to minimal removes, between the language of the text and the language of con~ sciousness. On a larger scale, the fact that I begin with nar- ators who exclude inside views and end with interior~ ‘monologue texts that exclude narrators also suggests that my typological lines are not entirely disengaged from the histori cal axisPreface But my study lays no claim to encompassing the entire realm of fictional form, either synchronically or diachroni~ ally. Itexplotes a special and specific subject, to which a gen eral poetics of fiction—including the most comprehensive and rigorous one to date, Gérard Genette’s Discours du récit—can ustally devote only a short section, Yet itis a privileged sub- ject: not only because so much modern fiction plays within the consciousness of its characters, but also because fictional consciousness is the special preserve of narrative fiction. For this reason the devices through which it is presented are closely allied—and frequently confuased—with the modes for presenting the fictional world as a whole: narrative situation or point of view, This brings me to a final prefatory point, The problem of narrative perspective, more than any other nattatological problem, has polarized literary scholarship in the last decades between the two Pascalian spirits: the proliferating finesse of criticism and the reductive géometrie of Tinguistics. In terms of ‘expository idioms: to one side the urbane, metaphoric, highly readable style and thought of the critic who refuses to engage in what he regards as hairsplicting definitions and distinctions; to the other the unreadable abbreviations and formulae of the linguist who refuses to communicate with readers unwilling ‘or unable to decipher his code. Ac the risk of falling between stools, I have tried for a compromise: to use (and, when necessary, t0 coin) a consistent, rigorous, but not recondite terminology for my subject, which I continue to use in unab- bbreviated form and in whole sentences, no matter how awk~ ‘ward or monotonous the resulting prose. Since the most important criteria I employ for typological distinctions are basic grammatical forms (especially tense and person), I have found that significant features in quotations could be preserved in translation, provided only that f scru= pulously sacrificed elegance to accuracy. For this reason the majority of translations from French and German are my ‘own; in some cases I was able to adapt, and, in a very few cases, to adopt, existing translations. But readers who know Prefve vi these languages will want to check my analyses against the original, reproduced at the bottom of the page. I would have preferred to use only works that I could read in the original myself, But the Russians were, of course, indispensable, as was one great Dane (Hamsun); experts in these languages were kind enough to check and amend for me some passages from published translations. All editions from which I quote, as well as those on which I base my translations, are listed in the back of the book, ‘Some of my ideas were rehearsed in article form, and I wish co thank the editors of Comparative Litersue, PMLA, Germanisch-romanische Monasschrift_ and Festschrift fir Kate Hamburger for permission to expand this material and to inte~ irate it nto my larger scheme. This scheme itself was worked out during a year generously supported by the Simon S. Guggenheim Foundation, as well as by Indiana University and Harvard University. Several friends and colleagues read my manuseript in whole or in part at various stages of com- position and offered valuable critical advice: Ruby Cohn, Ann Fehn, Paul Hemadi, Jan Hokenson, Breon Mitchell, 1 am deeply grateful to each of them. I would also like to express my thanks to a number of persons who, in varied but essential ways, helped me to overcome moments of discouragement in the course of my work on this book: Iso Camartin, Ruby Cohn (again), Dr. James Dalsimer, Judith Kates, Frank Ryder, Maria ‘Tatar, and my sons Steve and Rick. Further thanks go to Annemarie Bestor and Sara Milder for their punctual help with che preparation of the manuscript; and, finally, to Jerry Sherwood of Princeton University Press, forall che expert skill and care she gave this book, from first to last. Cambridge, Massachusetts December 1977.Contents Preface Introduction Part I Consciousness in Third-Person Context 1 Paycho-Narration ‘Early Avelderce Dissonone and Consonance Simmary and Espansion Norton af Sub-Veral Stes 2 Quoted Monologue ‘Modes of Quotation 3 Narrated Monologue nil Deveripion 1 Hiorial Perspective Symp rensons end Coxjuncions Part I Consciousness in First-Person Texts aie 21 26 33 46 58 38 16 99 99 407 116 126 143 145 153 161 166 173 195 18 186 198 207 27 232 27 255Transparent Mindstout the within, al th within space on never set he bain tnd heat and oh caves where thought an fei dace their sabbath . aaa ‘Samuel Beckeit, Molloy Introduction ‘The Greek god Momus, critic of his fellow gods and created reality, is said to have blamed Vulean be~ ‘cause in the human form, which he had made of clay, he bad not placed a window in the breast, by which whatever was felt or thought there might casily be brought to light. It is to this myth that Tristram Shandy refers when he secs draw his uncle Toby's character. Had Momus had his way, he tells us, “nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have taken a chair and ‘as you would to a dioptrical bee-hive, and looked the sou! stark naked: .. . chen taken you pen and wn nothing bat what you had seen, and could sworn to.” “But,” Tristram adds in realistic resignation, is is an advantage not to be had by the biographer in this planet; .. . our minds shine not through the body, but we are ‘wrapt up here in a dark jesh and blood; so that, if we wor them, we must go some other way to work.”* This is when ‘Tristram decides to “draw my uncle Toby’s character from his Hobby-Horse”"—choosing an emphat “other way,” as befits a biographer (and autobiographer) in this planet. 1 optical wish-dream shows up at the other end of the gamut of fictional genes, in a German Romantic fairy 3" Master Flea, the microscopic ‘Tyss a tiny magic eye, enables human beings he encounters, and to hidden thoughts, Peregrinus soon curses this “indestructible glass” for giving him an intelligence that rightfally belongs only to “the cternal being who sees through to man’s innermost self because he rules Both these fantasies, in. cheir invocation of unreal trans-4 Introduction pparencies, can stand as metaphors for the singular power pos sessed by the novelist: creator of beings whose inner lives he can teveal at will. Hoffman's image, by placing the glass in the eye of the beholder rather than in the body of his object, is the more suggestive of “omniscient” narrators. Tristram fac~ ing his opague uncle, by contrast, can stand for all incarnated narrators who inhabit the fictional reality they narrate. Proust’s Marcel, himself a member of this second class, can have only the first class of narrators in mind when he tells us that “the ingenuity of the first novelist . . . consisted in the suppression pure and simple of real people.” He too resorts ¢© optical imagery to explain how this is done and what advar~ tages ensue: “A zeal person, profoundly as we may sym- pathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have no strength to lif. ‘The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substitut~ ing for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial se ings, that is, ‘which the spirie can assimilate to itsel ‘That the distinction Proust draws between the people we know in real life and those we know in novels is a matter of common, if not commonly conscious, knowledge is illus- trated by a statement on the back cover of In Cold Blood “TRUMAN CAPOTE plumbed the minds and souls of real-life characters.” The publishers evidently thought this sentence sflciently sensational to place it amidst other, moze lurid blurbs. And they were right. The technique Capote uses to present the “reablife” murderers Perry and Dick is sensa~ tionally contradictory. I quote a random example: Waiting for Perry outside the post-office, Dick was in excellent spirits; he had reached a decision that he was certain would eradicate his current difficulties and start him on a new road, with a new rainbow in view. The cision invelved impersonating an Air Force officer. By writing worthless checks right around the cl Introduction 5 expected to haul in three, maybe four thousand dollars within a twenty-four hour period. That was half the plot; the second half was: Goodbye, Perry. Dick was sick of him... ‘This passage bears the unmistakable stamp of fiction. Dick's train of thoughts is known and conveyed by a voice that can only belong to a clairvoyant, disincarnated narrator. And by adopting this voice the reporter ‘Truman Capote has taken on the pose of a novelist, has fictionalized his relationship to the real Dick Hickock and transformed this gracsomely real per- son into a realistic fictional character. [As B. M. Forster noted, the same process takes place when a novelist creates a fictional character who bears the name of & historical personage. Forster even insists that a novelist has no business writing a Queen-Victoria-novel unless he plans ‘to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about ‘Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce character who is not the Queen Victoria of history."* Quite aside from the hidden matter such a novel may revealingly in- vent, itis its irreverent manner that gives piquancy t0 fic tionalized biography, and adds shock value to 2 narrative episode that presents a famous mind by purely fictional tech- niques: for example, the monologizing Goethe waking from sleep in Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. Ifthe real world becomes fiction only by revealing the hid- den side of the human beings who inhabie it, the reverse is equally true: the most real, the “roundest” characters of fic- tion are those we know most intimately, precisely in ways we could never know people in real life. “I confess," writes Mann in an essay on a rival at, “that in everything regarding Knowledge of men a3 individual beings, I regard drama as an art of the silhouette, and only narrated man as round, whi real, and fully shaped." But this means that che special life- likeness of narrative fiction—as compared to dramatic and ‘cinematic fictions—depends on what writers and readers know least in life: how another mind thinks, another body6 feels. In depicting the inner life, the novelist is truly a fab- ricator. Even as he draws on psychological theory and o1 trospection, he creates what Ortega called “imaginary psy- chology . . . the psychology of possible human minds”—a field of knowledge the Spanish critic also believed to be “the ‘material proper to the novel.""” ‘The more surprising, then, that the novelists most con ‘cerned with the exact representation of life are also those who place at the live centers of their works this invented entity whose verisimilicude itis impossible to verify. Stendhal de~ scribes the novel as “un miroir qu'on proméne le long dun chemin” in the very novel where he observes a character's thought processes more closely than writers had done before him, And despite the elaborate realistic apparatus that attests to the “reality” of his fictional facts, he never bothers to tell us—nor are We at all moved to ask—in what mirror, along what pathway, he saw the reflection of Julien Sorel's psyche The mutta! dependence of realistic intent and imaginary psychology is even more graphically illustrated in the work of Henry James. His most famous conceit for the aovel—the house of fiction with a million windows—is no Tess realistic in its spatio-optical clarity than Stendhal’s portable mirror, in ine with the verisimilar conception of the genre he expressed ‘more directly elsewhere: “The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does attempt to represent life”; “the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me to be the su preme virtue ofa novel.”® But in the preface to The Portrait of 4 Lady, as he stands at his own window in the house of fic- tion, “a figure with a pair of eyes, or at leist with a field- glass," these sober instruments of vision soon turn as magi- cal as the lens Master Flea gave to Peregrinus Tyss. For he is now watching another house of fiction om a reduced scale, "a square and spacious house . . . put up around my young ‘and this house is so constructed that its center is ‘own consciousness,” and even in “her re lation to herself,”" But beyond this, the ultimate sight and central site of this entire nest of houses and mixed metaphors woman, Introduction 7 is the solitary and totally inward scene of “my young ‘woman's extraordinary meditative vigil,” the famous chapter 42, which James called “obviously the best thing in the book. Dut... only a supreme illustration of the general plan." " Teis ako 2 supreme illustration of the paradox that narrative fic~ tion attains its greatest “air of reality” in the representation of a lone figure thinking thoughts she will never communicate to anyone. This paradox lies at the very heart of narrative realism, and has important theoretical and historical implications. Most writers on the novel have taken the transparency of fictional minds for granted; a few—like Proust, Forster, Mann, and ‘Ortega—have mentioned it in passing. But the first literary theorist who has fully explored its meaning is Kite Ham- burger in The Logic of Literature.'2 For Hamburger the repre~ sentation of characters’ inner lives is the touchstone that si- multaneously sets fiction apart from reality and builds the semblance (Schein) of another, non-real reality. She argues this thesis and explores its causes and results in two successive stages: 1) starting out from Aristotelian mimesis (understood as representation, not as imitation) she arrives at a theoretical differentiation between the language of fiction and the state ment-language of reality; and 2) starting out from textual ‘observations, she demonstrates that certain language patterns are unique to fiction, and dependent on the presence of fic- tional minds within the text. These language patterns are primarily the conveyors or signals of mental activity: verbs of Consciousness, interior and narrated monologues, temporal tnd spatial adverbs referring to the characters’ here and now, Hamburger concludes: “Epic fiction is the sole epistemologi- cal instance where the” originarity (or subjectivity) of a third-person qua third person can be portrayed." Tn approx smate translation: nazrative fiction is the only literary genre, ts well as the only Kind of narrative, in which the unspoken thoughts, feelings, perceptions of a person other chan the speaker can be portrayed. Hamburger's statement pinpoints the representation (mimesis) of consciousness as the subject8 Ineroduction that distinguishes narrative fiction from non-fictional narra tive to one side, from non-narrative fiction to the other (1. the other genres populated by invented persons) Hamburger’s Logic, as this summary barely suggests, gives 4 stringently argued theoretical grounding to the interde- pendence of narrative realism and the mimesis of conscious ness, In light of her analysis, the “inward curn’” of which Erich Kahler and other historians of the novel have spoken, * would signify a gradual unfolding of the genre's most distin~ tive potential, to its fall Bloom in the stream-of-conscious- ness novel and beyond, Modern writers of Joyce's generation themselves thought of the history of the novel in this fashion, "Thomas Mann postulated a “principle of internalization” that inivially sublimated the outer adventures of the epic hero into the inner adventures of the Bildungsheld, then continued mov- ing inward to greater passivity and complexity."® Vieginis Woolf believed that “Modern Fiction” would be returning to its “circular tendency,” with novels where “there would be hno plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catas- trophe in the accepted style,” but only “this varying, this un~ circumscribed spirit . . . with as little admixture of the alien and external as possible.'"!7 More surprisingly, one can find Similar statements in the earliest novel theorists, especially in Germany. Friedrich von Blanckenburg, in his Essay on the Novel of 1774 wrote (with his neo-classical tone nearly hiding the Hamburgerian insight): “A writer, lest he wish to dis- honor himself, can not hold co the pretense that he is unac- quainted with the inner world of his characters, He is their creator: they have received from him all theit character traits, their entire being, they live in a world that he himself has fashioned.’ Blanckenburg was so bent, in fact, on a novel's telling solely “the inner history of a man” that he wanted to exclude even the protagonist’s death from fiction, on the grounds that it was an externally determined event, (On this Tast point he relented after reading Goethe's Werther.) Some decades Sater, Schopenhauer anticipated the moderns even Introduction 9 more dleatly: “The more inner and the less outer life a novel presents, the higher and nobler will be its purpose. . . . Art consists in achieving the maximum of inner motion with the minimum of outer motion; for itis the inner life which is the ruc object of our interest." ‘This same call, sounding from such different times and places (and many more voices could be cited), suggests the importance of the mimesis of consciousness for the history of the novel. One could probably argue for a theory of cyclical (or spiral) return of the genre to its inward matrix whenever its characters get hyperactive, its world too cluttered, its orientation too veristic. Woolf and her generation, reacting against the Edwardians, would then figure as just one such 2e- turn in a series starting with Cervantes’ reaction against the chivalric epic (a5 Thomas Mann suggests), and ending provi- sionally with the reaction of New Novelists like Nathalie Sar~ raute against the “behaviorism’” of the Hemingway school. ‘This sketch of a spiral suggests that the “inward-turning” of the stream-of-consciousness novel is not nearly so singular a phenomenon, nor so radical a break with tradition as has been assumed, both by eritics who applaud it (Edel, Daiches) and by critics who deplore it (Lukécs, Auerbach, Wolfgang Kayser).#® To quote Ortega again, who has perhaps sug~ gested the most accurate image for the relationship between the stream-of-consciousness novel and the Realist tradition: the Proust-Joyce generation, he says, has “overcome realism by merely putting too fine a point on it and discovering, lens in hand, the micro-structure of life."=* This lens, another op- tical instrament to add to our collection, estranges as it mag nifies. But what i¢ estranges when it is trained on a fictional mind is something that had never been visible outside the pages of fiction in an earlier age either. Despite its scientific power, Ortega’s lens is no less (and no more) magic than Stendhal’s mieror or James’ field-glass. This view of the historical continuity underlies may typo- logical approach ¢o the presentation of consciousness in fic~10 tion, Despite the theoretical and historical importance of the subject, previous studies ofits formal implications have been Gisappointingly rapid and incomplete, They fall into two basic categories: 1. Studies (mostly published in the United States) that focus on the stream-of-consciousness novel, and especially on Ulpsees, generally treating the subject as though consciousness had appeared in fiction only on Bloomsday. This limited rientation oversimplifies the formal problem by reducing all techniques to a single and vague “stream-of-consciousness technique,” and at the same time overcomplicates it by asso ciation with broad psychological and aesthetic issues.** Leon Edel’s influential historical study, The Modern Psychological Novel, for example, yields no clarity at all concerning formal devices.29 Robert Humphrey's brief chapter on basic tech~ niques in Stream of Consciousness in the Modem Novel is the most differentiated discussion that has come out of this approach, but it suffers from characteristic limitations and confusions.* 2, Studies (mostly published abroad) that apply to the tech~ niques for presenting consciousness the model of the tech~ niques for quoting spoken discourse, They have generally applied simple correspondences between direct discourse and interior monologue, between indirect discourse and narrative analysis, and between the intermediary “fice indirect” forms of both spoken and silent discourse (style indivect libre in French, erlebte Rede in German). This approach, which has a Jong and venerable history in French and German stylistics, has been updated by stylistic linguists in the last decade and applied in the context of modem fictional modes, An article bby Derek Bickerton is of special interest in this regard, since it forges a bridge between literary and linguistic approaches to the subject: he translates the techniques Humphrey identified empirically in the stream-of-consciousness novel into the basic grammatical categories of quotation. The same basic method is applied by the French literary structuralists, nota bly by Gérard Genette in his influential “Discours du récit."” Introduction 1" Under the heading “récit de paroles," Genette pairs spoken and silent discourse according to degrees of “narrative dis- tance,” arriving at a threefold division between the poles of pure narration (diegesis) and pure imication (mirnesis).2° ‘This linguistically based approach has the great advantage of supplying precise grammatical and lexical criteria, rather than relying on vague psychological and stylistic ones. But it oversimnplifies the literary problems by carrying too far the correspondence between spoken discourse and silent thought. Speech is, by definition, always verbal. Whether thought is always verbal is to this day a matter of definition and dispute among psychologists. Most people, including most novelists, certainly conceive of consciousness as including ““other mind (as William James called it), in addition to language. ‘This “suff” cannot be quoted—directly or indirectly; ie can only be narrated. One of the drawbacks of this Linguistic ap- proach is therefore that it tends to leave out of account the en- tire nonverbal realm of consciousness, as well as the entire problematic relationship between thought and speech. Though my own discussion of the modes for rendering consciousness will be more literary than linguistic in its atten tion to stylistic, contextual, and psychological aspects, I take simple linguistic criteria for my starting-point in naming and defining three basic techniques. 1, Psycho-naration. The most indirect technique bas no fixed name; the cerms “omniscient description” and “internal analysis” have been applied, but neither is satisfactory.27 “Omniscient description” is too general: anything, not only nisciently.” “Intemal analysis” is misleading: “internal” implies a process occurring in, rather than applied fo, a mind (ef. internal bleeding); “gnalysis” does not allow for the plainly reportorial, or the highly imagistic ways a narrator may adopt in narrating con- sciousness ‘My neologism “ psycho-narration” identifies both the sub- |jectematter and the activity it denotes (on the analogy to psy- chology, psychoanalysis). At the same time it is frankly dis-2 Inrodution tinctive, in order to focus attention on the most neglected of the basic techniques. Stream-of-consciousness critics have ac- knowledged its existence only grudgingly, since all fictional psyches since Ulysses supposedly come atthe reader directly, Anahout che aid of a narrator; Robert Humphrey even declares that itis “something of a shock” to find writers like Dorothy Richardson “using conventional description by an omniscient guthor—without any attempt on the part of the author to dis- gris the fact,"2# And linguistic-structuralist critics, by reduc fg the technique to an unvoiced indirect discourse, disregard the ironic or lyric, reductive or expansive, sub- oF super ‘verbal functions that psycho-narration can perform, precisely because it is not primarily a method for presenting mental language.” > Quoted monologue. "The tendency to polarize techniques historically has even more lastingly confused the technique that, from a purely grammatical point of view, is simplest to define. According to the post-Joycean canon interior mono- logue was supposed not to have existed before Ulysses (with the notable exception of Dujatdin's novel Les Lauriers sont coupés). But what was to be done with direct thought= quotations in novels like Le Rouge et le noir or Crime and Punishment? Most critics accepted the thesis developed by Dujardin in his book Le monologue intérieur, where he draws sharply divisive line between quotations of the mind found in strean-of-consciousness novels and those found in more ta ditional novels. Insisting that the term ‘“interior monologue” Should be reserved for the modern “Blowing” variety of thought-quotations, they have suggested such terms as “tra ditional monologue” or “silent soliloquy” for thought-quota~ tions found in pre-Joyccan novels.% The tendency has been to distinguish between them on both psychological and stylistic tgrounds: dhe interior monologue is described as associative {llogical, spontaneous; the soliloquy as rhetorical rational, de liberate.2" Staccato chythmns, ellipses, profuse imagery are at- tributed to the interior monologue; more ordinary discursive language patterns to the soliloquy. Ineoduction 7 Even though this division has a certain historical vailidity, impossible to decide on the basis of such nuances whether ‘text is, or is not, an interior monologue: many quotations of fictional minds (in both pre- and post-Joycean novels) contain both logical and associative patterns, so that their degree of “fluidity” may vary from moment to moment (and from in- texpreter to interpreter). The interiot monologue-soliloquy distinction, moreover, makes one lose track of the twin de~ nominators common to all thought-quotations, regardless of their content and style: the reference to the thinking self in the first person, and to the narrated moment (which is also the ‘moment of locution) in the present tense. This overarching grammatical structure clearly differentiates the most direct technique from the other techniques for rendering conscious ness in a third-person context. ‘As for the term “‘interior monologue”: since the interiority (silence) of self-address is generally assumed in modern narra~ ‘interior” is a near-redundant modifier, and should, on logical grounds, be replaced by “quoted.” But the term “interior monologue” is so solidly entrenched (and has such a long and colorful history in the modern tradition) that ‘¢ would be lost than gained in discarding it completely. 1 «will therefore use the combined term “quoted interiot mono- ogue," reserving the option to drop the second adjective at will, and the fist whenever the context permits. 3. Narrated monologue. The final basic technique in the third-person contexc is the least wellknown in English criti- cism, Even such sophisticated genre critics as Scholes and Kel- ogg discern only “two principal devices for presenting the inner life”: narrative analysis and interior monologue.°? This dua leaves a wide empty middle for the technique that probably renders che largest number of figural thoughts in the fiction of the last hundred years, but beats no standard English name. The French and German terms 6 Iibve and erlebie Rede) are sometimes used, as w rect speech,” “indirect interior monologu speech,” etc, [ have previously tagged this technique “nar- it“ Introduction rated monologue," a name that suggests its position astride Jarration and quotation. Linguisticaly itis the most complex ofthe three techniques: like psycho-narration it maintains the third-person reference and the tense of narration, bur Hike the Guoted monologue it reproduces verbatim the characters own mental language. Tn sum, three types of presentation of consciousness can be demtified in the context of third-person narration, to each of which | devote a chapter in the first part of my study. In cap- Sule formulation: 1. psycho-narration: the narrator's dis Course about a character's consciousness; 2. quoted mono~ Togue: a character's mental discourse; 3. narrated monologue: 4 character's mental discourse in the guise of the narrator's discourse, ‘Strangely, the study of techniques for rendering conscious ness has focused almost exclusively on third-person narrative texts (with the notable exception of texts cast entirely in inte Hor monologue form). The fact that autobiographical nar- ators also have inner lives (their own past inner lives) to Communicate has passed almost unnoticed. But retrospection nto a consciousness, though less “magical,” is no less impor tant a component of first-person novels than inspection of a Consciousness is in third-person novels. The same basic types of presentation appear, the same basic terms can apply, mod {fied by prefises to signal the modified relationship of the nar~ ‘ator t0 the subject of his narration: psycho-narration be~ Zomes selfnarration (on the analogy with self-analysis), and qnonologues can now be either self-quoted, or selfnarrated. If it were merely a matter of surveying an analogous terri- tory in which “he thought” is replaced by “I thought” the bipartite division of my study into third~ and first-person nar ative forms would lead to nothing but redundancies. But the parallelim between them stops as soon 2s one goes be {yond the definition of the basic techniques. There is, for one thing, a profound change in nazrative climate as one moves perween the two terricorics—a change that has been under- ated in recent steucturalist approaches.*° It stems from the al- Introduction 5 tered rclationship between the narrator and his protagonist ‘when that protagonist is his own past sclf. The narration of inner events is far more strongly affected by this change of person than the narration of outer events; past thought must now be presented as remembered by the self, as well a8 ex pressed by the self (je., subject to what David Goldknopf falls the “confessional increment”).*7 All this substantially al- ters the function of the three basic techniques in autobio- graphical narration. But there is another and far more important reason for the division by person: where the most direct method for the pre- sentation of consciousness is concerned, radical dissym~ metry appears between third- and first-person forms. In third-person context the direct expression of a character's thought (in first-person form) will always be a quotation, a quoted monologue. But this direct expression of thought can be presented outside a narrative context as well, and can shape an independent first-person form of its own: the type of text also normally referred toas “interior monologue” (Les Lauriers sont coupés, “Penelope”). At this point it becomes clear that the term “interior monologue” has been designating two very different phenomena, without anyone's ever stopping to note the ambiguity: 1) a narrative technique for presenting a character's consciousness by direct quotation of his thoughts in a surrounding narrative context; and 2) a narrative genre constituted in its entirety by the silent self-communion of a fictional mind.** Though the technique and the genre share some psychological implications and stylistic features, their narrative presentations are entirely different: the first is mediated (quoted explicitly or implicitly) by a narrating voice that refers to the monologist by third-person pronoun in the surrounding text; the second, unmediated, and apparcntly self-generated, constitutes an autonomous first-person form, which it would be best to regard as a vatiant—or better, limit-case—of first-person narration. “This terminological ambiguity too originated with Dujar- din, who had a special reason to conflate the owo meanings:16 Introduction his claim that Les Lauriers sont coupés was the sole ancestor of Ulysses would have been weakened if he had drawn attention to the basic structural difference between the two works: the absence of a narrative context in his own novel, and its pres ence in Joyce's. But it is obvious on the face of it chat Ulysses js not an interior-monologne novel in the same sense a5 Les Lauriers is. Joyce's awareness of this difference is apparent in his own description of Dujardin's novel, as reported by Va- ry Larbaud: “In that book the reader finds himself estab om the first lines, in the thoughts of the principal personage, and the uninterrupted unrolling of that thoughe, replacing the usual form of narrative, conveys to us what this personage is doing and what is happening to him.” He could scarcely have meant this description to apply to Ulysses, since (with the nocable exception of the final “Penelope” sec- tion) interior monologue is everywhere embedded in a third-person narrative medium. The “first lines” of most of its sections (including of course the first lines of the entire work), far from establishing the reader “in the thoughts of the principal personage,” ate clearly told in “the usual form of hnarrative.’® Wherever the monologue technique appears in Ulysses, it alternates with narration, and these narratorial in- natter how brief, permeate the self-locution with a discontinuous element, even as they relieve it of certain notorious difficulties of the autonomous form (e.g., the de~ scription of the monologist’s own gestures and surround~ ings). No matter how untraditional their Joyoean modula- ns, stich sections as “Proteus” or “Hlades" are therefore simicurally analogous to the quoted monologucs in the novels of Stendhal or Dostoevsky rather than to the autonomous form of Dujardin’s novel It is probably no coincidence that Joyce's comment on Les Lawriers dates precisely from the time when he was writing “Penelope,'"# the only section of Ulysses that does have a structure analogous to that of Dujardin’s novel. The com- ment itself still stands today as the most accurate capsule de- scription we bave of the interior monologue a8 a separate fic= Introduction 7 tional form: a first-person genre that, for the sake of clarity will call “autonomous interior monologue,” a term that accu- rately reflects its same-different relationship to the quoted in terior monologue.*? For this autonomous form also, we can again safely drop the second adjective in most instances. An alternate term I will sometimes use is “interior monologue text” (or “novel” Despite its notoriety, the autonomous interior monologue in its pure form is a very rare species, even if we count in (as ‘we must) the separate sections from larger texts that take this form (“Penelope,” or Mann’s Goethe monologue). Yet it is a genre that is entwined with other first-person genres in far more intricate ways than has generally been understood, Both typologically and historically there are multiple intermediate stages between autobiographical and monologic texts, and the two categories can be separated only by closely examining these transitional variations. In this region, the study of tech- hiques for rendering consciousness therefore necessarily spills Over into the larger problem of narrative genres (and the nar~ rative genre), with the autonomous monologue acting as an essential touchstone for defining what the “usual form of nar- rative” isby what it isn’. This seview of my terminology has also served as a pre~ view and preliminary charting of the terrain that will untold in the suecessive chapters.